Applicants claim priority under 35 U.S.C. xc2xa7119 GERMAN application No. 101 09 554.6 filed on Feb. 28, 2001.
The invention relates to a method for determination of the electrical characteristics of an arrangement of conductor elements (conductor pieces) by means of a computer, wherein the conductor elements are at least partly dissected into segments which carry each a fraction of the total current through the related conductor element and wherein the electrical characteristics of the segments and the mutual electromagnetic couplings between the segments are modelled by means of partial impedance values which are assigned to the respective segments.
The invention further relates to a method for determination by means of a computer of the electrical behaviour of integrated high-frequency inductors as well as a computer program for the performing of the method in accordance with the invention.
In the field of modern microelectronics there is a trend towards smaller and smaller device dimensions and higher and higher clock rates. This leads to the development of microelectronic components requiring today a precise investigation of the high-frequency characteristics of the current carrying elements. The reason for this is that conditional on the high signal frequencies the dimensions of the conductor elements lay in the region above the skin depth, so that especially the ohmic resistance of the conductor elements will significantly depend on the frequencies of the signals to be carried. Integrated circuits normally contain a complicated arrangement of a multitude of conductor elements. The precise characterization of the electrical behaviour of such structures is of big importance because mutual inductive and capacitive couplings between the conductor elements will significantly influence the signal quality and therefore the system performance. Of special interest is the analysis of the impedance behaviour of integrated inductors as e. g. used in the modem mobile and satellite communication technology. Integrated micro-inductors are used for example in oscillators for mobile phones. The inductance and the ohmic resistance of such an inductor influences both the resonance frequency and the quality factor of the oscillator. A precise analysis of the impedance behaviour of such inductors is essential for rapid, cost effective and norm-fulfilling development of integrated circuits for the communication technology. During development of fast digital circuits it is also important to perform an analysis of the transmission characteristics of interconnects and of the interconnecting elements so that signal delay, signal cross talk, and tendencies to oscillate can be evaluated.
During development of integrated circuits in which inductors are used it is today common practice to manufacture complete inductor test fields in advance and to undertake them a characterization by measurement. This method is already disadvantageous because of the very high efforts which are caused by it. Moreover, for circuits which operate at high signal frequencies very small inductance values are needed. The dimensions of such inductors can be in the order of some tenth of microns. However, the measurement of such small impedances is difficult and the measurement results are error-prone due to the high tolerances of the available measurement instruments and due to the surrounding influence on the measurement arrangement which cannot be neglected.
Because of said reasons today one goes over to simulating the electrical characteristics of conductor arrangements before the manufacturing by means of computer-generated models. In this case methods are very powerful with which the impedance behaviour of a physical model of the related conductor arrangement is determined, wherein the model represents the real geometry of the conductor elements as close as possible. This power comes i. a. from such models allowing a broadband analysis and being applicable in both frequency domain and time domain. Therefore also non-linear effects can be analysed which are especially of big importance for circuits of the communication technology.
Such a method for calculation of the frequency-dependent resistance and inductance of an arrangement of conductor elements is proposed e. g. by Weeks et al. (IBM Journal of Research and Development, vol. 23, no. 6, pp. 652-660). The known method especially takes into account said high-frequency effects, e. g. skin effect and proximity effect. For this it is necessary to model the current density distribution inside the conductor elements. In said document for this it is proposed to dissect the conductor elements into segments which are straight and parallel to each other and which each carry a fraction of a total current through the related conductor element. There it is assumed that the current density inside the separate segments is constant. However, because the current density varies from segment to segment, the overall current density distribution of the related conductor elements is thereby reproduced as a discrete model. The known method is based on the theory of partial impedances (cf A. E. Ruehli, xe2x80x9cInductance Calculation in a Complex Integrated Circuit Environmentxe2x80x9d, IBM Journal of Research and Development, vol. 16, pp. 417-481). With this it is possible to assign a set of partial impedance values to every separate segment with which the electrical properties of the segments and the mutual electromagnetic couplings between the segments can be fully described. The partial impedance values depend only on the geometric arrangement and the form of the segments and can be easily calculated. Even complex conductor geometries can be easily handled by performing a suitable dissection into segments. From the viewpoint of mathematics the determination of the impedance in a network of conductor elements can be done by the known method of partial impedances by solving linear equation systems. The actual analysis of the network then is done by inversion of corresponding matrices whose matrix elements are the partial impedance values of the segments. These matrices contain on the diagonal the resistances of the segments and their self-inductances. Outside the diagonal the complex symmetrical matrices contain the mutual inductance values between different segments. If a frequency dependent impedance analysis is to be performed, for every frequency to be examined an inversion of the impedance matrix has to be performed because the complex partial impedance values are naturally frequency dependent.
With the known method the said high frequency effects can be examined because those are modelled by the mutual inductive couplings between the segments. Thus it is possible to e. g. determine the frequency dependent resistance of a conductor arrangement with a given geometry. For the analysis of inductances it is important that the frequency dependence of the self inductances of the conductor elements can also be calculated with high accuracy.
With the known method, the dimension of the linear equation systems (analysis in the frequency domain) or the coupled differential equation systems (analysis in the time domain) to be solved depends on the number of segments, as described above. The application of the method is therefore limited to those cases where the arrangement of conductor elements to be examined can be modelled by dissection into a few hundred segments with sufficient accuracy. For complex conductor arrangements the known method is slow and extremely memory intensive. In addition, during examination of high signal frequencies an extremely fine dissection of the conductor elements has to be performed, because a correct modelling of the high-frequency effects can only be performed if the dimensions of the segments are smaller than the corresponding skin depth.
Starting from that, the invention is based on the problem to improve the known method of modelling the impedance behaviour of a network of conductor elements in such a way that a fast and effective analysis is also possible for complex conductor arrangements, without accepting loss of the results accuracy.
This problem is solved with a method as mentioned above in the way that during the calculation of the electrical characteristics of the whole conductor arrangement mutual partial impedances are only taken into account between segments in spatial proximity.
Therefore a physical model of the conductor arrangement is modified in a way that the electromagnetic couplings between the separate conductor elements can be performed independent of the self inductances of the respective conductor elements, because the self inductances are already being modelled by mutual couplings between the segments.
The invention is based on realization that the mentioned high-frequency effects are local phenomena phenomenons. Only electromagnetic interactions between segments in spatial proximity play a role. The couplings between distant segments are so similar to each other that these can be described by taking into account the mutual electromagnetic couplings between the conductor elements itself without losing accuracy during calculation. The dimensions of the matrices which have to be inverted during the impedance analysis according to the invention are therefore strongly reduced in comparison to the known methods. This results in a strong reduction of the required computing time as well as a significantly lower memory requirement. Spatially distant segments are treated independent of each other during the method of this invention. All in all with this method analyses even of complex conductor networks can be performed within a short time on usual computers.
The skin effect causes a concentration of the current flow in the regions near the surface of the conductor elements. The skin effect is caused by magnetic interactions inside the single conductor elements. If during the method of the invention only influences on the impedance behaviour caused by the skin effect should be taken into account, the calculation can be advantageously restricted to mutual partial impedances between the segments of the same conductor elements.
The proximity effect influences the current density distribution in directly neighboured conductor elements. The proximity effect which is based on the inductive coupling between different conductor elements is just as the skin effect only at high signal frequencies of significant influence on the impedance behaviour. The proximity effect can advantageously be modelled in the method of the invention by taking into account mutual partial impedances only between segments of the same conductor elements and directly neighboured conductor elements.
During the impedance analysis according to the method of the invention of course the electromagnetic couplings between distant conductor elements can not be left out of consideration. For determination of the mutual inductive couplings between spatially distant conductor elements it is sufficient if the induced voltages, caused by the respective total current flowing through the distant conductor elements, are calculated. That is, according to the invention the self inductances of the separate conductor elements are treated independently from the mutual couplings between the conductor elements. With this an effective impedance analysis of the whole arrangement of conductor elements is possible, wherein the high-frequency effects which only appear locally are treated separately from the inductive couplings between the spatially distant conductor elements. The particularly high effectiveness of the method according to the invention is based on this distinction, by which a particularly fast and cost effective development of integrated devices is made possible. With the described method for taking into account the interacting inductive influences between spatially distant conductor elements a coupling between conductor elements is modelled which is free of local retroaction, by which the physical reality is not fully truly represented. However, this approximation leads to a significant speed-up during the modelling of the electrical characteristics of the conductor arrangement, wherein the accuracy of the calculation is only insignificantly reduced.
For determination by a computer of the electrical behaviour of integrated high-frequency inductors which consist of a series connection of conductor sections which are flown through by a total current which is impressed onto the inductor, a method is suitable in which the conductor sections are dissected in segments which run in parallel to the direction of the current flow, wherein the segments each carry a fraction of the total current and to which respective partial impedance values are assigned, wherein during the calculation of the impedance of the inductor arrangement mutual partial impedances only between the segments of the same conductor section and the segments of directly neighboured conductor sections are taken into account, and wherein for modelling the mutual inductive coupling between the other conductor sections voltages, which are induced in those by the respective total current flowing through the distant conductor sections, are calculated. By this the application of the method according to the invention to integrated high-frequency inductors is described which usually consist of such an arrangement of inductor sections. The method according to the invention is suitable especially for the modelling of such inductors, because the separate conductor sections can be dissected very easily into segments which run in parallel to the direction of current flow. The necessary partial impedance values for the segments arranged in this way can be calculated particularly easily easy.
For performing of the method according to the invention a computer program is suitable which, starting with a set of input data by which the geometry of an arrangement of conductor elements and their electrical parameters is defined, determines the impedance behaviour of the conductor arrangement by dissecting the conductor elements at least partly into segments which run in parallel to each other, to which respective partial impedance values are assigned, wherein during the calculation of the impedance of the whole conductor arrangement mutual partial impedances only between segments in spatial proximity are taken into account and wherein in addition for each conductor element an induced voltage, caused by the total current flowing through the distant conductor elements, is calculated. Such a computer program can be implemented on usual computers without problems and can advantageously be used in combination with usual circuit simulators, e. g. SPICE. The computer program can be provided on storage media such as floppy disks or CD-ROM or for download over the internet. The computer program performing according to the method of the invention makes possible for the user a fully automatic impedance calculation of a network of conductor elements, wherein only their geometry must be predefined by the user. In addition, electrical parameters such as the specific resistance of the conductor elements are also required for the calculation.